Esperanto Is Handy When You Want To Speak To The World

Hyman Meltz was attending a puppetry convention in Washington, D.C., in 1980 when he first felt the frustration of being cut off from people who spoke other languages.

''Puppeteers were there from all over the world, and I found I couldn't talk to most of them. We had a whole group from Japan, and hardly any of them spoke English. We bowed to each other, and that was about it.''

This so frustrated Meltz, a 66-year-old retired English teacher who lives in Oviedo, that he mulled over the problem until a solution presented itself. ''I saw an article in a stamp collecting magazine about Esperanto. It suggested that if you want to correspond with people all over the world, learn Esperanto.''

Meltz, a puppeteer, stamp collector and grammarian, did just that. He took the 10-week introductory correspondence course. Then he sent away for Esperanto books. Last summer he went to San Francisco State University for a three-week course in speaking the international language.

Now he corresponds in Esperanto with people in China, Spain, Norway and Japan, and he reads newspapers and magazines published in Esperanto all over the world. He has his own little class teaching Esperanto to neighbors at his Oviedo mobile home park ''so I'll have somebody to talk to.''

The class meets Tuesday afternoons at the Palm Valley clubhouse to explore the tenets of this language without a country: Nouns always end in ''o.'' Letters have only one sound. The accent always falls on the second- to-last syllable. And grammatical rules, unlike so many in the English language, are never broken.

Esperanto was developed a century ago by a Polish physician, L.L. Zamenhof. He believed that a simple, utilitarian language that could be learned quickly and had no inherent political identity would help bridge gaps between nations and cultures. He published the first book on his invented language in 1887 under the pen name Dr. Esperanto, which in his language means ''one who hopes.''

Zamenhof's hope -- that Esperanto would become a second language for the world -- has not been fulfilled in the century since he introduced the language. But Duncan Charters, president of the Esperanto League for North America (P.O. Box 1129, El Cerrito, Calif. 95430) said that interest in the language is keener than ever. About 100,000 people use it regularly and millions of others have a passing familiarity it, he said.

In Europe, Charters said, ''they are researching whether Esperanto might be a bridge language for universal computer communications.'' It is already used in international commerce, tourism and academia. Charters, an associate professor of foreign languages at Principia College in Elsah, Ill., said, ''I find it very convenient to use Esperanto to communicate at other universities throughout the world.''

While some say that widespread knowledge of Esperanto would advance the cause of world peace, Hyman Meltz has more modest hopes for the international language. ''I wouldn't think this is the be-all and end-all,'' he said. ''There are plenty of countries that speak the same language but don't get along.''

But he said that learning Esperanto is a first step toward understanding, and one that requires comparatively little effort. ''You can take 10 lessons and write a postcard in Esperanto,'' he said. ''You would be a long time before you could write a postcard in Spanish.''